Queen Elizabeth II opened the Sydney Opera House on October 20, 1973. The building had taken fourteen years to finish, ten years longer than planned, and it had cost over a dozen times the original estimate. The controversy died the moment people saw it.
The design came from a contest. A Danish architect named Jorn Utzon won in 1957 with a drawing of white shells rising from the harbour, and the drawing was dismissed by some judges at first as too daring to build. The engineers had to invent new ways to make the curved roofs stand.
Utzon never saw it finished. The costs and the politics wore him down, and he resigned in 1966 and left Australia, never to return to see his building completed. The interior was finished by others, and the shells that had caused so much trouble became the building's whole identity.
The Opera House changed Sydney. It became the city. A city that had been a pleasant colonial port became identified with a single image, and the building drew the world's eyes to the harbour. It worked as a concert hall and a theatre, but its first job was to be looked at.
The building is now a symbol of Australia itself. It was listed as a World Heritage site in 2007, and Utzon was reconciled with it before he died, his son taking up the work of restoring it. The shells he drew on a competition board became one of the great buildings of the century.